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ST. PAUL, Minn. — Many Minnesotans likely won’t forget the reports of a couple of years ago that a cougar was making its way around the northern Twin Cities suburbs.

That adventurous cat eventually made it all the way to Connecticut, where [she] was killed by a car.

A report from the University of Minnesota researcher published in The Journal of Wildlife Management notes that cougars like that one are slowly expanding their range eastward returning to areas where they were a century ago.

Cougars… once lived across most of the country. Long pushed into mountainous hideouts, they’re making a comeback. Many of them roam from the Black Hills of South Dakota, where at least 220 of them live.

U of M doctoral student Michelle LaRue has been compiling confirmed sightings and physical evidence collected by agencies and a non-profit group called the Cougar Network.

LaRue found 178 cougar confirmations in the Midwest, with numbers steadily increasing over the last 20 years. That may not sound like a lot of sightings, but LaRue said the team was very particular about the evidence it accepted.

“…just in case you start making smoothies” she said. I haven’t made a smoothie in maybe 38 years.

But as she was packing the second trailer full of stuff this weekend, I got to hear about every little item she was going to “leave” for me. It was pretty much all things she didn’t want or need.

Not that it matters to me. I just moved around the remaining furniture to make it look like there was something reasonable in each room. Two bookcases in a corner with a chair next to it became my library.

Frank the sled dog wouldn’t have left anyway. But I wish that Bob The Hairy cat would have snuck on board.

But the thing I had the most fun with this weekend was getting some baby pheasant chicks, and less fun was making the pen in the woods out back for them. Three of the bigger ones got loose in the transfer.

Someone told me that pheasants are fast. That’s like saying that meteors fall to earth “at a pretty good clip”. I took off running through the brush with my long-handled net, and ended up looking like I had gone through a shredder. I only got within ten feet of one of the long-legged chicks before it took to the air for a fifty-foot flight.

I’ll settle for seven chicks. I picked them up near a bar in a little town a few miles from here. You can get chicks there for two bucks apiece. “Money for nothing, and chicks for (nearly) free” came to mind. So already I have seven chicks living with me. And Dog and Bob.

In divorce papers filed with a Rabbinical Court in the southern Israeli town of Beersheba, a man claimed living with his wife has become unbearable ever since she took in some 550 cats.

The man complained that the cats would regularly block his access to the bathroom and made it impossible to cook or eat, as they would constantly swipe his food off the table. He also alleges that their insistence on sharing the couple’s bed prevented him from getting any sleep.

Though the pair reportedly tried to reconcile, they ultimately decided to go their separate ways after the wife refused her husband’s request to dump the cats.